American Beauty

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.



Look closer. Sam Mendes' (Skyfall) direction met with Conrad Hall's mellifluous cinematography and a captivating, yet inherently disturbing, performance from Kevin Spacey to create this dark and often bitter nineties satire with a comic bite. Centred around, but by no means limited to, the perspective of Lester Burnham, a man 'awakening' to the realization that he is bland, forgettable and has nothing to show for his life. Commence mid-life crisis, but not the kind you think you know. A tale magnifying the flaws of suburban American life, where an appearance-obsessed culture is undressed to reveal the intricate unpleasantries which lurk beneath. The film also follows the lives of Carolyn (Annette Bening), Lester's dissatisfied and sporadically maniacal wife, Jane (Thora Birch), his weird and 'misunderstood' daughter, and Jane's overtly sexual friend, Angela (Mena Suvari), the sneeze which nudges Lester's avalanchine crisis. 

The eponymous American Beauty sprung from the name of a rose, which is the films' main star. Perhaps most memorably, we see the Beauty in Lester's fantasia. Scarlet petals burst from Mena Suvari's breasts as she strips, and surround her as she bathes on that iconic film poster. But these red roses leak through the confinements of dream sequence to perpetually permeate its waking mise-en-scene. Whether it be the perfect picket-fenced garden, embroidered with the flowers, to the injection of the blood red hue of Angela's lipstick, Carolyn's coat, the front door. As in The Sixth Sense and that piercing scene from Schindler's List, red punctuates the film, a symbol of lust, passion, fertility, violence and eventual death. A rose is the vision of intricate perfection, which is what, in their embodiment of the American Dream, these characters strive for. 

But American Beauty urges the audience to look closer. It happens that the eponymous character is more than it seems, the ironically named American Beauty species of rose being prone to rot at the root, despite its superficially pleasing aesthetic. As its petals obscure and eroticise Angela, who is also more and less than she seems, the beauty is a shroud to the deep set rot which settles just below the surface of suburban life. The narrative trajectory leads the characters to discover beauty in less obvious places. Jane is befriended by her dealer neighbor (Wes Bentley) who introduces to her, literally through a camera lens, the way he sees the world. A carrier bag blowing in the wind mesmerizes the (admittedly probably stoned) fellow. But the ultimate message here, I believe, that beauty, just like art, is subjective to the beholder. Objects or people we may not deem special or beautiful can be more exquisite than superficial beauty, if we look closer.